Cheerful Curmudgeon

Candy and I are just back from a week in Door County, WI. Wow! The stories we were told were all right: gorgeous sunsets, great food, interesting parks, fun shops.

Breakfast at Trollhaugen Lodge

We stayed in one of the bed & breakfast rooms at Trollhaugen Lodge on the north end of Ephraim. (They also have a log cabin and several motel rooms.) Norma and Terry pampered us well, fed us exquisitely, and generally made us feel more like long lost relatives than paying guests. Believe me, there ain’t nothin’ like breakfast on the deck on a sunny summer morning.

Enough words, though, the pictures tell all. Click through to see my photos from Penninsula State Park, Cana Island lighthouse, Newport State Park, and Ephraim sunsets. Here’s a small sample to whet your appetite.

Sunset in Ephraim, WI

This is why we fly. I took these photos flying over Illinois at 5,000 feet. Make your browser full screen and click through to see the pictures large.

If you are reading this on Facebook, you won’t see the photos until you click on Cloud Dancing.

The sun set as we flew home over Illinois yesterday. Here is a small sample. These photos really look better large so make your browser window full screen and click through to the photo gallery for maximum enjoyment.

I sold my Nikon D200 and lenses and bought a (lighter) Nikon D90 with (lighter) lenses. Not much time to write now (work calls) and none last night (I was playing with the camera) but here is one photo that I took last night:

Mr. Toad

There are more photos in my my D90 gallery on Smugmug.

Candy and I have talked about building or buying a home theater computer (HTPC) for years. We have a pretty nice home theater including a projected HD picture that is almost 100″ diagonal and fairly impressive 5.1 sound. This gear works great for DVDs and HD-DVDs (yes, I picked the wrong horse in that race) but, being me, I want more. I want to be able to listen to all of my music on it, including the tracks that I buy from emusic.com and I do not want to mess around with CDs. (Isn’t it amazing that, back in the Dark Ages, I used to be annoyed when I had to flip an LP over every 15 to 20 minutes; now I am annoyed that I have to change CDs every hour.) I have gazillions of digital photos which I would like to enjoy in the comfort of my den and in a more share-able form than my laptop screen. I even have a small collection of digital video which, like the digital photos, I want to see bigger than my laptop screen.

I have noodled, off and on, with building an HTPC from open source projects such as MythTV and Freevo and Medibuntu. None really hooked me. The technology is still so new that you need a pretty carefully crafted recipe of hardware components to make it all work well and the chore of concocting the recipe and then locating all the right parts was too daunting. Worse, I was afraid that I would end up with a system that was so complex that only I could dependably run it.

I even considered buying a pre-built system with Windows Vista Home Premium. My friend, Steve, has one and it is a beautiful thing: everything just works. In my den, when it is time to watch a movie, I want to turn the equipment on and simply watch the movie. Three things put me off of this idea, though. I do not want a whole computer in my den. I certainly do not want to mess with a keyboard and mouse. And I do not want to pay as much for a HTPC as such a system would cost by the time I bought hardware which included a Blu-ray player, a video card with HDMI output, and a sound card with optical output.

Given this state of affairs, I had given up on getting a HTPC, figuring that I would revisit the idea in a year or so.

Candy and I are narrowing in on our tenth wedding anniversary. As a present to ourselves, we decided to replace our HD-DVD with a Blu-ray player and that meant that I got to play one of my favorite games: comparison shopping for electronics! I was completely surprised to find many reviews like CNET’S Best Blu-ray Players from January 28, 2009 which rank the Sony PlayStation 3 at the top of the list.

This list consists of the best Blu-ray players on the market and the bottom line is clear — the Sony PlayStation 3 is by far the most recommendable Blu-ray player available today. There are a few caveats — the PS3 doesn’t have analog multichannel outputs or an IR receptor — but they’re overshadowed by the fact that you also get a high-def gaming console and media streamer. Some home theater die-hards will insist on a standalone player, but everyone else should stick with the PS3 until standalones cost much less and perform comparably.

Beyond the basic PS3 system, I needed add only one accessory: a “real” remote control for playing movies so that I would not need to fiddle around with joysticks and a gaming remote. Sony sells a DVD remote control which looks surprisingly like the remote for any other DVD player; it has all of the right buttons in familiar places and with familiar labels. At $20, this was a no-brainer add-on. Read the rest of this entry »

I was reading “Married to the Craft” in the June 2006 issue of Popular Photography. Hanson Fong, the subject of the article, was quoted as saying,

Over the years, a few really talented artists have been gifted with the rare ability to light and pose faces and bodies to make them most attractive. I knew that, basically, I wasn’t one of these geniuses, so it became my goal to find the masters and learn what I could from them. That’s the great thing about photography: It’s learnable.

I love to learn new stuff. To me, the great thing about life is that it’s learnable. Almost invariably, if you look at something – anything – closely enough, you will find it interesting and you will learn something fascinating.

Yesterday, I learned from the president of SellByOwnerListings.com that home owners who are selling their homes without a realtor (“for sale by owner”) will often do pretty much anything to avoid realtor commissions and are often much more patient than a seller who is using a realtor. A FSBO seller might gladly wait several months to find the right buyer while the realtor-employing seller wants to get it done as soon as possible.

This morning, I learned some fascinating and intricate tidbits about the ways in which the service provided by air traffic controllers can deteriorate when pilots ask for certain routings. As a pilot, I have often used just such routings because it was convenient for me and I never dreamed that my request would have farther reaching consequences. (See “Say Again? #63: A Phrase That Fits” by Don Brown at AVweb.com.)

The day is still young. I wonder what I will learn next.

One of the main reasons why I upgraded from a Nikon D70 to a Nikon D200 is the vastly improved quality of available light photographs. I shoot a lot of indoor swimming pictures, often in poorly lit swimming pools.* I created a comparison album with a couple of typical pictures so you can see the difference.

Take a look and be sure to turn on the “smugloupe” feature. It will create a “magnifying glass” so you can see the photographs in detail. Alternatively, you can download the original camera files to your computer and examine them with your favorite image processing software.

* OK, I am actually next to the pools, not in them.

I just upgraded from a Nikon D70 to a Nikon D200 camera: WOW what a difference. I have been too busy taking pictures to write about pictures but here are the things that leaped out at me first:

• Available light image quality is vastly improved. I had been jealous of my son’s D50’s quality and the D200 easily surpasses even that.
• Incredible color accuracy. I shot a swim meet and, expecting performance similar to the D70 and D50, I set the camera accordingly. I overcompensated and should have simply trusted the camera to do it right.
• Amazingly fast shutter; no lag time. I had thought that the D70 and D50 were fast but, when shooting swimmers, I find that I am shooting too early and need to retrain myself. What I had thought was slowness on my part in pushing the shutter button on the D70 was, in fact, shutter lag in the camera.

I also upgraded to the Nikon 70-200mm f/2.8 ED-IF AF-S VR zoom lens but that is the subject of another rave for another day.

I pulled the camera out on yesterday’s flight home from Syracuse, NY and got quite a few pictures that please me very much. Here is my favorite:

Every once in awhile, someone integrates existing technologies in a way that clearly makes life better in simple, clear ways. I think that Kodak has done so with their EasyShare-One camera. Wired News reports it well in, Death of the Digital Middleman

After a summer-long delay, Kodak has begun shipping the first digital camera with Wi-Fi technology that will allow consumers to send photos directly to friends and family by e-mail without a computer.

Owners of the new EasyShare-One, priced at $600, can send photos through a Wi-Fi transmitter at home or work, or pay $5 a month to connect the camera with any of T-Mobile USA’s 6,000 hot spots at stores, airports, hotels and other establishments.

I, like virtually everyone else that I know, take zillions of pictures that I would like to share with friends but I rarely get around to it. I have been tempted by the camera phones that can zip photos off to unwitting victims via the cell phone network but have been put off by two factors. First, the photo quality is appalling, and, second, the photo quality is appalling. (Yes, I admit it. I’m a snob when it comes to picture quality.)

Pictures taken with most digital cameras now rival the ones taken with film cameras, at least for 4×6 snapshots. The cost and convenience of “developing” the digital pictures is comparable to that of developing and printing a roll of film.

Kodak’s innovation, though, is in giving us a truly new convenience feature that is not possible with film. I can’t wait to see what comes next.